The Smallest Bible in the World from the RBNI - Technion

The Smallest Bible in the World from the RBNI - Technion

The Shrine of the Book Celebrated this year 50 Years with a renewed exhibition space and special displays: "And Then There Was Nano" features The smallest Bible in the World from the RBNI at Technion.

The new exhibition space was inaugurated on April 20th with the display of "And Then There Was Nano": The Smallest Bible in the World, revealing to the public for the first time the world’s smallest copy of the Old Testament.

Developed by researchers at the the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute at the Technion in Haifa, the nano bible showcased the incredible story of the world’s smallest Hebrew Bible etched onto a microchip no larger than a grain of sugar.

The Nano Bible is a gold-plated silicon chip the size of a pinhead on which the entire Hebrew Bible is engraved.

The text, consisting of over 1.2 million letters, is carved on the 0.5mm2 chip by means of a focused ion beam.

The beam dislodges gold atoms from the plating and creates letters, similar to the way the earliest inscriptions were carved in stone.

The writing process takes about an hour and a half. The letters belong to a font unique to this technology and appear darker against their gold background. In order to read the text, it is necessary to use a microscope capable of 10,000 times magnification or higher.

The exhibition includes narrative presentations explaining the story behind the creation of the Nano Bible and detailed media through which the Hebrew Bible has been interpreted over time, tracing the path from the Biblical Nation to the Start-Up Nation.

This remarkable technological achievement will bring to a broad audience the context of the narrative of the Shrine of the Book and of the history of Biblical text from the ancient Dead Sea Scrolls to the most cutting-edge technology.